Prime Minister Stephen Harper calls Ashley Smith’s 2007 death in Canada’s prison system a “terrible tragedy.” He calls the behaviour of Correctional Service Canada “completely unacceptable.” Yet he has been content to let federal lawyers fight doggedly to limit the scope of the coroner’s inquest into her death.

That has left Canadians wondering just what the prison service is trying to hide in a scandalous case that has appalled the nation, created a furor in Parliament and dragged on for far too long already.

While it’s good to hear that Public Safety Minister Vic Toews’ office has at long last instructed CSC to “co-operate fully” with the coroner, Dr. John Carlisle,

Rather than let “arguments between lawyers” go on endlessly, Harper should make it clear that Carlisle, an Ontario coroner, must have the full federal co-operation he needs to get to the truth.

The motto of Ontario’s chief coroner’s office is We speak for the dead to protect the living, and inquests are held to determine how a person died, and by what means. In Ashley Smith’s case, the true answers to those questions must be sought during the last year of her life when she was transferred 17 times among institutions in four provinces. The abuse she suffered was an indictment not only of a few Ontario prison warders but also of the folly of criminalizing the mentally ill, and of the inadequacy of the nation’s prison system in coping with severely ill people.

Narrowing the inquest to Smith’s final confinement at a Kitchener prison for women where she choked herself with a strip of cloth while guards watched and did nothing, as federal lawyers hope to do, will not assure the public that everything has been done to learn from this case, to improve the broader prison system’s capacity to deal humanely with seriously ill inmates.

Smith was a deeply disturbed teenager from Moncton, N.B., who was failed by her community, school, the mental-health system, the youth justice system and ultimately the prison system. First jailed at 15 for throwing crab apples at a postal worker, her sentence grew from days to years for in-custody incidents including vandalism and assaults. She spent long periods in segregation. She routinely threatened suicide, attempted it and harmed herself.

And this past week Canadians got their first, troubling look at Smith’s rough treatment in detention. Videos that the correctional service fought for years to suppress were finally screened in public. One shows a phalanx of riot-clad guards in Quebec tranquilizing Smith, by then 19, against her will. Another shows her, hooded, on an aircraft between Saskatoon and Montreal while guards duct-tape her to a seat, and threaten to tape her mouth if she resists. Months later she was dead.

Granted, there are tangled legal issues in this case. Provincial coroners don’t normally have the scope to conduct inquiries into how federal facilities are managed and run. Their ambit is narrower. Canadians get that. But we also need to get at the truth. In Smith’s case, the tragic narrative of her life and death spans years, provinces and institutions. Unless Ottawa is prepared to hold a full public inquiry, the coroner should be free to seek it where he must.

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